


Pressure Points

by Boton



Series: The Road to Appledore [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Medical, Missing Scene, No Johnlock, No Slash, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 21:59:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2667893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boton/pseuds/Boton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has always depended on his abilities to be more correct than incorrect when he performs a deduction, but the Magnussen case has been an exception.  Through a series of slightly mistaken assumptions -- maybe the result of sentiment -- he now finds himself back in hospital for the second time, trying to figure out how he can confront Magnussen in the future.</p>
<p>Missing Scene from His Last Vow</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pressure Points

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes and his universe are the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock is the creation of the BBC and its partners, and of co-creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Some brief excerpts of dialogue are taken from Sherlock. This work is for my pleasure and that of my readers; I am not profiting from the intellectual property of those creators listed above.
> 
>  
> 
> Author's Note: I wanted to explore the idea that, throughout HLV, Sherlock misinterprets a lot of information, ultimately leading to him standing at Appledore with no choice but to shoot Magnussen. I'll explore the Appledore visit in a different piece, but this one takes a look at how Sherlock may have been "off his game" from the time he met Mary and certainly by the time she shot him.

“John, Magnussen is all that matters now. You can trust Mary….”

Sherlock hadn’t intended to call an ambulance at all, planning to help John and Mary resolve the situation of Mary’s duplicity and then return to hospital in some dignified manner, like a black cab delivering him to the front door. But when it became clear that John was not going to be able to quickly make the leap, not be prepared to accept the truth of Mary’s past as quickly as Sherlock could, Sherlock directed his dysfunctional little family back to Baker Street. Back to their home, to hopefully help John work through the betrayal so that they could unite to stop Magnussen.

John and Mary were so focused on their own pain, so tightly wrapped in layers of guilt and fear and anxiety, they didn’t even notice Sherlock pause as he entered the foyer of 221 to make a phone call to emergency services. He steeled himself to suppress the growing pain and lightheadedness that gave warning of his deteriorating condition, his increasing certainty that the internal bleeding had sped from a trickle to a flood as he headed closer and closer to shock and collapse. He only had to hold on for eight more minutes.

As it turned out, that’s all he had left in him. As he urged John to trust Mary, Sherlock attempted to hold himself upright on his feet, failing as his field of vision narrowed and blackness threatened to overwhelm him. He felt the hands of the paramedics lay him as gently as possible on the floor, one reaching quickly for an oxygen mask that muffled Sherlock’s groans of agony, the other opening his shirt to reveal the dressing soaked in blood, covering torn stitches and giving a hint at the equivalent devastation inside his peritoneal cavity. 

Eyes tightly shut against the pain, he heard John’s voice, calm, clear, and intense, giving the bullet about Sherlock’s condition. “Thirty-six year old male with gunshot wound to the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, significant hepatic damage and minor damage to the inferior vena cava. Surgery to repair occurred last Thursday. Left The Royal London Hospital AMA this afternoon. Suspected internal bleeding and signs of shock.”

Sherlock gasped as they loaded him on the trolley and began transporting him downstairs, the sounds of John’s footsteps echoing down the seventeen steps from the flat to hold the doors of the building, then continuing with the paramedics to help load Sherlock into the ambulance and jumping in to accompany them.

“Hang on there, mate,” John said as the ambulance doors rang shut, putting his hand on Sherlock’s shoulder and bending down to Sherlock’s ear to lend his voice and his presence as a focal point without distracting the paramedics from giving emergency care. “You just need to hang on a little bit longer, and we’ll get this all sorted.”

The trip to the The London was a blur, as was the transfer into the A&E and on to prep for surgery. Every bump of the vehicle, every move to a new surface, every jostle to remove clothing or start additional lines caused white hot pain to explode through Sherlock’s body. He was dimly aware when John was asked to leave so that Sherlock could be transported into surgery. “I’ll be here when you get out, so don’t go giving up on me,” Sherlock heard John’s voice say before the gurney moved him quickly into the operating theater and into all-encompassing darkness.

***  
Sherlock felt rather than saw the post-op ward. The darkness didn’t lighten so much as back off, allowing him to perceive the quiet intensity of the nurses working around him, hear the multiple monitors signaling a patient’s stable vitals or sounding an alarm if there was trouble. He couldn’t sort out which tones belonged to his monitors, which regular beeps represented his own heart, and it bothered him. It seemed that he should be able to deduce information about what had happened from listening to his own vitals, but he couldn’t separate the data from the confusion around it.

“Mr. Watson, you can’t come back here.”

“Doctor. And yes, actually I can. I have admitting privileges at this hospital, my friend is lying over there recovering from emergency surgery, and I’m coming in.” John’s voice held a command that came part from the battlefield, part from medical authority, and entirely from concern. “I won’t get in your way,” he added, more softly.

Sherlock tried to open his eyes, to tell John that he was OK, to urge John to go back to Mary and the case, but he couldn’t shake off the weight that held his limbs immobile, his eyelids shut. He felt John lean over him to get a better look at monitor readouts, check his lines, and flip through his chart, then heard him take a seat near the head of his bed, squeezing his shoulder first in a gesture of comfort. “You made it through, mate. You made it through. Again,” he sighed. 

Sherlock swallowed, wanting to respond, but instead felt a wave of nausea roll through his stomach and settle at the back of his throat. The darkness beckoned him back into a place where there was no pain, no nausea, and no worry about how Magnussen could hurt his friends. He crawled back into the darkness and let it embrace him.

***  
The darkness finally began to give way, allowing Sherlock to break the surface of the anesthesia and start to regain consciousness. Even before he opened his eyes, he began to catalog the salient facts and deduce his situation. He could feel the slight tilt of the head of a normal hospital bed and the irritation of the prongs of the nasal cannula, both indicating that his post-op recovery was complete. The soft scent of flowers and the gentle warmth of sunlight slanting from the east-facing window onto his blanketed legs indicated that he was back in the same room he escaped from the prior evening. 

And, as the anesthetic fog continued to leave his mind, a new piece of data: pain across his midsection, seeming to stretch from side to side of his abdomen and deep into his body. The new surgical incision began to make itself known, to delineate every layer of skin and muscle and organ tissue that had been cut, repaired, and sutured. The pain quickly grew more intense even as Sherlock’s consciousness returned to him. This situation called for a chemical intervention.

Cracking his eyelids ever so slightly, he saw the blue PCA machine positioned once again near his left hand, and, without thinking, he engaged his abdominal muscles and began to sit up to reach the controls.

“Son of a ----,” he rasped, choking on the last word and squeezing both his eyes and his teeth shut as he fell back against the pillows, waiting for the blinding white flash of pain to recede.

John laid his book down and stood up beside Sherlock’s bed rails. “Well, all things considered, that’s better than hearing you call my lying wife’s name first thing after surgery,” he said mildly, reaching across Sherlock’s bed to the PCA. “Need some help with the morphine?”

Sherlock grunted his assent as John increased the flow of the drug, then watched as it perceptibly hit Sherlock’s system, causing his muscles to relax and his face to register the decrease in pain, even as his barely-open eyes began to unfocus. “Here we are again, eh?” he said quietly to John, aware that his words had lost their usual crisp enunciation and were slurring into one another.

“Yeah, you irresponsible git,” John said with slightly more heat behind his words. “You could have told me what you figured out about Mary without endangering your own life. Not sure how it helps for me to lose my wife and almost lose my best friend in the same evening,” he added, perching on the edge of the chair and leaning forward in a posture that told of his agitation.

“Couldn’t hear it from me,” Sherlock said softly, taking short bites of his sentences to avoid breathing too deeply and aggravating the fresh surgical wound. “Had to hear it from her.” “And I had,” he continued, “to be there for you both.” 

“Yeah, well, seems like you could have chosen a less dramatic way to make your point” John said, sounding slightly mollified. “But drama’s kind of your thing, innit? Anyway, I think you have a few more pressing things to deal with at the moment,” John said, nodding at Sherlock’s surgical wounds.

Sherlock opened foggy eyes and attempted to glance downward at a swath of bandages obscuring his midsection where just yesterday a relatively small dressing hid the neat incision they had used to remove the bullet and repair his damaged liver. Clearly, things had escalated this time around, which could pose a significant problem if he wanted to deal with Magnussen sooner rather than later. 

“How bad is it?” Sherlock asked.

“Well, not great,” John said, flopping back into the bedside chair and looking levelly at Sherlock. “I hope you like the décor and the meal plan around here, because it’s going to take some time to get you back on your feet, let alone back to climbing out of windows and doing multimedia presentations in Leinster Gardens.”

In spite of the grim news, Sherlock smiled slightly. Projecting Mary’s wedding portrait onto the façade of his Leinster Gardens property had been an indulgence as much as a protection for him, and he was pleased that it had not gone unappreciated.

But the theatrics of the Leinster Garden meeting were the last thing that Sherlock had been completely in control of. Most of the time, he acknowledged to himself, his deductions weren’t about certainty, and they didn’t need to be. Instead, they were usually a blend of his lightning-fast ability to calculate probability and his inherent flair for acting confident. Take the average human being and confront him with a stream of inferences based on careful observation and statistical likelihood, all confidently stated, and it was likely that the subject would forget the wrong guesses and focus on the right ones. In crime-solving, it was even easier. Any crime had a closed universe of possibilities for who could have done the deed; it just took the ability to think faster than everyone else to solve the crimes that Scotland Yard thought unsolvable.

But from the beginning, the Magnussen case had not been like this. Sherlock had had to confront the uncomfortable feeling of being out of control from the moment Magnussen had chosen his fireplace as a makeshift urinal. And Sherlock knew that last night’s adventure had involved far more close calls than he usually had to face.

“But really, Sherlock,” John said, unable to let the subject rest. “How did you know about Mary?” John’s voice cracked with the heartache behind the words. “You say I knew, but I swear, mate, I had no clue.”

“I both saw…and observed,” Sherlock sighed, fighting the drowsiness from the morphine necessary to keep him comfortable. “I’m sure you have questions. I appear to have some time on my hands to answer them,” he said wryly.

Sherlock and Mary had hit it off immediately on the night Sherlock bollixed up announcing to John his return to life and to London. Sherlock was attracted to Mary’s ability to face him head-on, as an equal, almost as an immediate partner in the important job of “keeping John Watson’s life interesting.” Instead of siding with John in his rage and hurt, Mary had sided with Sherlock as if she knew that Sherlock believed whatever had kept him away for two agonizing years had been worth the pain it had caused his best friend. 

In retrospect, that probably should have been his first clue. But Mary had fit into his partnership with John so seamlessly that it almost seemed like she’d been there forever. Like she had a natural ability to instantly become exactly the person both John and Sherlock needed at the time.

Leaning forward so he could place his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped between his legs to steady the tremor that had suddenly returned to his hand, John asked in a low voice, “What even happened in Magnussen’s office? Did you know Mary was going to be there? Was she,” he paused and swallowed, “working with someone else or was she there on her own?”

“No, John, I didn’t know Mary was going to be there,” Sherlock said, his voice tired and his eyes clouded. “I thought she was Lady Smallwood from the back. Was certain of it, in fact, until she turned around. She was scared, John, and clearly concerned about keeping you from becoming involved.”

He should have thought of Mary the moment he smelled the distinctive notes of Clair de la Lune perfume in the air in Magnussen’s reception area, but he had dismissed the clue. Nothing, then, prepared him for the shock of seeing Mary in Magnussen’s office, pistol in hand, clearly prepared to use it. Whatever Magnussen had on Mary, it must have driven her to murderous intent, and she pulled the trigger on Sherlock before he could possibly help her. 

But something didn’t add up. Had Mary wanted to kill Sherlock, at a distance of six feet or so, even an inexperienced shooter with a modicum of medical knowledge could have aimed for and hit the heart. Something told Sherlock that Mary hadn’t mis-aimed a kill shot but rather had used her medical knowledge to deliver a shot to incapacitate him. But he needed proof of this before he dared to believe his best friend was not in danger from his own wife.

“So that’s why you woke up here calling her name,” said John, the barest hint of pride in his voice. In the midst of a horrifying situation, he still recognized that his wife was the one who had taken Sherlock Holmes by surprise.

“Yes, until I had time to think it through,” Sherlock confirmed. “But I was a little busy in the interim, what with worrying about your safety and almost dying and things like that,” he said with a smile that hinted at his usual smart-arse personality.

Just puzzling out that much had taken an agonizingly long time. The morphine had filled his mind palace with a dense fog, slowing his quest to make the connections and find the data he needed. Ironically, it was Janine who helped him break through. Her fiddling with the PCA machine, turning his morphine dose down to a bare trickle, brought excruciating pain, but it also brought brief clarity of mind that allowed him to realize that he could not put the physical comfort of his bodily transport before the safety of his friend or before his duty to protect many others from the threat that was Magnussen.

So, like the scientist that he had always been, he constructed a hypothesis. His error had been taking Mary at face value when the clues had always been there. Mary had never really seemed rooted in her world; it always seemed that she could become what was needed in any situation, indicating a depth of skill that would be difficult for a London nurse to accumulate. Her ability to remember minute data like the room assignments of guests at her wedding, her ability to recognize a skip code, even her casual mention of her orphan status to excuse a lack of family and friends at the wedding were all a little too pat to be real. So there must be another identity behind the façade of “Mary Watson.”

That day, after Janine left, Sherlock grabbed his phone and started searching public records databases. Relatively quickly, he came across the plot map for Chiswick Cemetery and found the listing for Mary Morstan, birth and death dates both coinciding with Mary’s own birthday. And, pairing this data with his assumptions about the accuracy of her single shot into his liver, he developed the theory that she was a former intelligence agent on the run, trying desperately to create a new life in the ashes of her old one.

“So you came up with intelligence agent,” John said. “How in the bloody hell did that make any sense? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Obvious, John,” Sherlock said, voice strengthening a bit as he warmed to his favorite subject, explaining his deduction. “She had all the skills of a former agent, including the ability to hide in plain sight.” He sighed. “Telling you, however, was a bit more difficult. After all, I’m your best man,” he smiled. “My job is to support your marriage, not tear it apart before it was three months old.”

This time, Sherlock had to prove he was right. And John needed to accept this information. He loved Mary; that much was obvious to Sherlock from seeing the pair of them together. And John had always had a craving for adventure that would let him accept Mary’s past if only he would allow himself. After all, John was the man who followed through on sharing a flat with Sherlock after one meeting and an evening’s adventure that included a threatening conversation with Mycroft, a quadruple murder investigation, a drugs bust, and the need to shoot Moriarty’s agent Jeff Hope in order to save Sherlock’s life. If John was adverse to danger, he didn’t show it when choosing his friends. 

Sherlock had to prove his theory. So he summoned John and Mary to Leinster Gardens, John to listen and Mary to talk. He was sure that, once John heard the truth, he would accept Mary’s past. And Sherlock would be free to pursue Magnussen. John and Mary would have each other and the baby, and Sherlock could take whatever risks were necessary to stop Magnussen from ruining lives, one after the other, all for the pleasure of watching people squirm, and beg, and cower under his hyperhidrotic touch. 

Sherlock was the ideal person to take down Magnussen. He was impenetrable. He knew that Mangussen operated on the principle of “pressure points:” vulnerable, emotional parts of a person they would do anything to protect. Lady Smallwood’s pressure point was her husband, a good man who had done nothing wrong other than flirt with a too-sophisticated-looking teen some thirty years ago. John’s pressure point was clearly Mary, the woman he had sworn to spend his life with.

John smiled slightly at Sherlock’s statement, then looked at him with an appraising, physician’s eye. “Hey, mate,” he said, “I’m tiring you out, aren’t I?” Sherlock slid his eyes over to where John sat, making an uncharacteristic admission of weakness as he nodded assent. “Why don’t you rest a bit?” John asked. “I’ll hang out here until the nurses come in again to check your vitals, then I’ll head out.” Sherlock closed his eyes and thought of the case that waited for him and for his return to the game.

“I hope you don’t mind if I kip at Baker Street for a while,” John said. “You don’t appear to be using it at the moment and, um,” John looked down at his still-clasped hands, “I just can’t face Mary right now, even if you forgive her.” Sherlock could feel the waves of pain radiating from John as he fought to adjust to this new view of the woman he loved. Even so, Sherlock knew, if Magnussen came back to hurt Mary, it would be the end of John.

Sherlock had no pressure points. As he lay in the hospital bed, tethered to heart monitor and pulse oximeter and central line, he felt confident that he was free to confront Magnussen. Sherlock had no vulnerabilities; growing up with Mycroft as an older brother had ensured that. He knew that he had nothing so important to him that he would flinch away if Magunssen touched it. Unlike the others, there was no one, nothing, that he found so important that it could be used against him. Even the drugs were a clever ruse to fool Magnussen into thinking he was a junkie; he had walked away from them before in his life and he could walk away again. Just like he had always been able to walk away from anyone and anything.

As Sherlock’s eyes began to drift shut, weighed down by the morphine and by the incredible physical damage from which his body needed to heal, he looked over at John. John was staring at his book again, clearly not seeing the pages, fingering the wedding ring on his left hand. This time, if something happened to Sherlock, he would know that John was protected by a family of his own. 

And Sherlock? He was alone. That had always protected him, and it always would. Nothing or no one could push him past his breaking point. And it was time for Magnussen to see that.


End file.
